Gawky synthpop scamps quivering in corners Bergen's
Casiokids may once have been although in the wake of their third and debatably most muscular full-length, Aabenbaringen Over Aaskammen, they return to the tenebrous caverns of London's underground to sell out Rivington Street's swankiest subterraneous railway tunnel, Cargo. It's our inaugural
Eat Your Own Ears show of 2012, and it left us stupefied; asinine beam indelibly etched from ear to ear; genuinely thankful an irrepressible festive greed never resulted in the gnawing of aural receptors...
Up first however are
FAMY, who seem to be attempting some faux mystique à la Crystal Fighters and wind up sounding like a cross between bad Islet and bearable Rumble Strips, thus bad either way. There's not enough erotic nudity (or 'nudité') out there to be excavated from the grimiest ends of the internet and stuffed on
the Facebook page to possibly enamour further to their oh-so-eloquent yelps and yowls: asserting – perhaps jovially – to originate from 'Mediterrasia', spick-and-span accents belie such futile attempts to culture the esthétique française they positively crave. They may recite French verse in a lengthy intermission, yet sonically they merely relate to LOTP diving out into the recycled tropical waters to have flooded lo-fi of late. They soon recede, washed from memory as a tide of bods splashes up on the shores of the stage.
The highly luggable Casio keyboards then emerge as Beck-alike Ketil Kinden Endresen and Fredrik Øgreid Vogsborg placidly tinker with catastrophic tangles of wiring. Inflated into a sextet for the show it's immediately apparent that these particular 'kids have now grown up. That's not to say that the infectious exuberance of the show has been diluted; if anything it's becoming forever more concentrated. Nor can it be inferred that the Norwegian popsters have matured musically for their restlessly relentless off-kilter disco tendencies continue to incite compulsive pogoing, to paint beads of sweat onto the iciest of brows, to inveigle dubious aromas into seeping out from underarm areas. But in this cramped and restrainedly chaotic atmosphere, Casiokids come of age.
They almost instantaneously hit their stride in letting Det Haster! fly, its staccato strings traded in for pulsating bass and meticulously processed lines of synth that seep into the very lifeblood of us all. Right here, right now. So-called 'moments' are ubiquitous, occurring often enough to incur a comforting state of delirium: the skittering Metronomy-ish 'awkpop' of Golden Years, dedicated genuinely and gladdeningly to Stephen Bass of superlative London label Moshi Moshi, bounds energetically in one ear and out the other
like a bouncy ball flung from Booji Boy's fanny pack, before the afro-infused funk of Olympiske Leker fills the air, jostling with particles of pure humidity endeavouring to evade the penetrative rays of omnipresent emerald laser. Perhaps joshing, they proclaim the track to have been written for London's Olympics and while few of the throng fess up to having procured a ticket or two for the group stages of the mens' handball or the Taekwondo quarter finals, were Casiokids to curate the Opening Ceremony rest assured we'd be clamouring to bundle in, battering on the BT Tower for ever-illusive corporate ingress. London Zoo unleashes the mutilating sentimentality of Mew and unites it with a celestial, Casio-based bliss, while Finn Bikkjen is transmuted into syllabic singalong with rudimentary, arpeggiated wonk and wobble offset by every whisper of organic shekere shakery.
Much ado has always been made of their election to sing in their native Norwegian despite their English fluency (which is tonight, once again, exposed to be exemplary) yet when hissed through towering PA systems, that which is blurted tends to blend into an amalgam of variable harmoniousness regardless. Tonight however language becomes irrelevant, their every lyric sounding ever more comprehensible to all ears ignorant of this charming Scandinavian lingo, the understated intricacies behind the patently gleeful ebullience softly accentuated. Closer Fot I Hose morphs into an extensive activity in dub as instruments are chopped and changed, crashed and walloped; the ceiling opens up to piss confetti; we're cajoled into a digital scream-off with those crammed into The Cluny 48 hours previously; and a girl who seems never to have caressed the smooth neck of a Telecaster stabs at it wildly, painfully yet inexplicably tunefully and somehow in keeping with the joyfully unruly nature of this spectacular beast.
With Cargo transformed into a paradisiacal indie disco where all wandering eyes are met and a disc jockey with glinting discoballs for peepers spins unheralded hit after futurological pop belter, last night Casiokids saved my life and filled my legs with lactic acid.
